Mobile is uniquely positioned to bridge the information and financial gap in rural areas at scale. Mobile operators can deliver the critical information farmers need to make better informed decisions that boost their productivity and profit. Through the digitisation of agricultural payments, mobile enables currently mostly unbanked smallholder farmers to access formal financial services.

The GSMA mAgri Programme forges partnerships between mobile operators, technology providers and agricultural organisations. By providing deep technical expertise to service providers, we support scalable commercial mobile services that impact smallholder farmers and the agricultural industry at large.

All our work is done with a social impact objective. Data from GSMA-supported projects demonstrates that active users of mobile agriculture information services report significantly more on-farm changes than comparable non-users (e.g. planting, land management, harvesting). For example, active repeat users in Pakistan are 1.9 times more likely to report an increase in income than non-users, and active repeat users in Malawi are 3.6 times more likely to report an increase in production than non-users.

Everything we learn is made available to investors, donors, mobile operators, AgTech providers, content developers and others on an unrestricted and royalty-free basis. All the lessons learned from implementation are available for public use – check out our recent resources.